BBC: Ways of Seeing, Episode One

John Berger for the BBC

Ways of Seeing, Episode One

Read John Berger’s three essays; “Ways of Seeing", “On Rembrandt’s Woman in Bed” and “On Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew.” Then, watch the first episode of the television series Ways of Seeing, written by Berger and produced by Mike Dibb for the British Broadcasting Network in 1972. Berger later adapted the series into a book of the same name, from which the essay Ways of Seeing comes. Below, you’ll find some questions that invite you to work further with the video.

Credit: Ways of Seeing, Episode One. © 2014 BBC Worldwide. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Figure 20.9

QUESTIONS FOR A SECOND VIEWING

 

1.

Question

Toward the end of the video, Berger tells viewers that they should be skeptical of his ideas and presentation of images because he’s arranged them for viewers. As you watch, make a list of the ways he’s arranged the images of paintings (and perhaps the way he’s “arranged” or positioned you as a viewer.) What does Berger want you to see? How do his arrangements shape his arguments? Do his arrangements make you skeptical of his comments on paintings and their reproductions?

2.

Question

Berger claims that film sequence relies on narrative. Narratives have beginnings, middles, and ends; they have storylines and push viewers to see ideas and images in certain ways. Berger makes a point to situate his arguments about paintings and the reproduction of images in this video narrative. He says contexts matter too. Where we see painting and images shapes our understandings of them. Take notes as you watch his video of the various contexts in which he presents the paintings. How do the various contexts shape your understanding of the paintings and their reproductions? How does their being embedded in the narrative of the video shape your understandings of them?

3.

Question

Early in the video, Berger establishes the camera and eye as equivalent. The images, he says, come to you. You don’t go to them. In the third episode, he tells us that the images come to us in a narrative, in an unfolding story with points to make. Take notes on the moments in which you as a viewer are aware that the paintings and their reproductions are situated in a video narrative. What does the video narrative allow Berger to do to you as a viewer, to your understandings of the paintings and their reproductions that his text in his essay doesn’t allow?

4.

Question

Berger says that the meaning of paintings and their reproductions changes with what comes before and after them. In this section, he also introduces the Franz Hals painting. Take notes on how he situates or arranges this painting for you, his viewer. What comes before and after the images of the painting as they appear in the video? Re-watch this episode at least once to take careful notes and to jot down what you see in this painting, what you think it means, what you think Hals was trying to communicate with it. How does the meaning you see in the painting evolve, shift, or change with the ways the painting is placed after and before other images?
Figure 20.10

ASSIGNMENTS FOR WRITING

1.

This video is essentially another version of a section of Berger’s essay, “Ways of Seeing.” He makes a number of claims in the video version that you can test by comparing your reading of the essay to your watching the video. One of those claims has to do with the ways in which your attention is directed by the camera, the video eye. Another claim of his is that your understanding of the paintings and their reproductions has to do with both the context in which you see them and what comes before and after their images.

Question

For this assignment, write an essay in which you test Berger’s claims about the ways in which your understanding of the Franz Hals painting is manipulated differently by the video and the text. Neither situation is arrangement free. Begin with the assumption that as a reader and a viewer, you are always being situated to see things a certain way. What moments in the video stand for you as significant arrangements of Hals’s painting because of the camera’s focus and because of what is placed before and after the paintings’ images? What too are the significant moments in the essay that guide or shape your understandings of Hals’s painting?

2.

“Images may be like words,” Berger says, rather than holy relics. As words, they communicate meaning to us. For this assignment, examine Michelangelo da Caravaggio’s painting Supper at Emmaus. This is the painting that Berger shows to the children to spark their discussion. This assignment has several parts:

First, write a two to three paragraph explanation of what you think the painting is about.

Next, gather a small group of people to look at the painting and to talk about what it means to them. Ask them what the painting might be about, what they see, or what it means to them. Take notes on the conversation.

Question

Finally, reread your writing. Then, write an essay in which you explore what the small group said about the painting and compare that to what you wrote. What surprised you? What did you see that they didn’t? How is your explanation different from theirs? And what would you conclude that it means for a painting to speak to people.